New Mazda BT-50 here in September

First examples of the hotly-anticipated all-new Mazda BT50 ute are expected on sale in Australian showrooms in the first half of September.

That’s sooner than expected as Mazda has been sticking to the line that it would be on sale late this year.

Pricing for the new Mazda BT-50 has yet to be announced, but is expected one to two weeks prior to its appearance in showrooms.

The timing also means the new Isuzu D-MAX, with which the BT-50 shares its mechanicals, will officially go on sale ahead of the Mazda on September 1. The outgoing BT-50 is a co-production with the Ford Ranger.

Other new utes due out very soon include the top-selling Toyota HiLux in late August, the Nissan Navara in November and a Great Wall model in December.

The most popular 4x4 dual-cab ute versions of the BT-50 will be first to arrive in showroom, with single-cab and Freestyle extra-cab versions following up to a year later.

There won’t be many examples of the new BT-50 dual-cab arriving initially and carsales understands they won’t arrive in Mazda showrooms nationwide simultaneously.

That means order deliveries could easily drift out into 2021. Mazda has yet to open pre-orders for the new BT-50.

Production, delayed by COVID-19, starts in early August in Thailand and will take some time to ramp up, hence the staggered roll-out.

While that sounds like a recipe for dealer angst, a carsales source said Mazda was trying to get ahead of that issue by assuring the network its distribution strategy would be fair and equitable.